Animalism and the vagueness of composition

Title:

Animalism and the vagueness of composition

Creator:

Bělohrad, Radim

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:09deca1d-198d-4dbd-94f2-986c13259e16
uuid:09deca1d-198d-4dbd-94f2-986c13259e16
doi:10.31577/orgf.2019.26202

Subject:

Animalism, Lockeanism, partial identity, personal iden-tity, supervaluations, and vagueness

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

bez média and svazek

Description:

Lockean theories of personal identity maintain that we per-sist by virtue of psychological continuity, and most Lockeans say that we are material things coinciding with animals. Some animalists ar-gue that if persons and animals coincide, they must have the same intrinsic properties, including thinking, and, as a result, there are ‘too many thinkers’ associated with each human being. Further, Lockeans have trouble explaining how animals and persons can be numerically different and have different persistence conditions. For these reasons, the idea of a person being numerically distinct but coincident with an animal is rejected and animalists conclude that we simply are animals. However, animalists face a similar problem when confronted with the vagueness of composition. Animals are entities with vague boundaries. According to the linguistic account of vagueness, the vagueness of a term consists in there being a number of candidates for the denotatum of the vague term. It seems to imply that where we see an animal, there are, in fact, a lot of distinct but overlapping entities with basically the same intrinsic properties, including think-ing. As a result, the animalist must also posit ‘too many thinkers’ where we thought there was only one. This seems to imply that the animalist cannot accept the linguistic account of vagueness. In this paper the author argues that the animalist can accept the linguistic account of vagueness and retain her argument against Lockeanism.

Language:

Slovak

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
policy:public

Coverage:

207-227

Source:

Organon F: filozofický časopis | 2019 Volume:26 | Number:2

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false